When you start reading a novel with the highest expectations, chances are you will be disappointed when you turn the last page. Unfortunately, this was the case with The Marriage Plot, a novel I have looked forward to before its title was even announced. Perhaps I might have been less critical, if an unknown author had written The Marriage Plot, and I might have even checked out this unknown author’s earlier works. In other words: The Marriage Plot is not a bad novel. But it was written by the author of Middlesex, a book I so thoroughly enjoyed and admired, that I entered the experience of reading its sequel with a good deal of anticipation.

That one novel creates expectations for another novel, that a book is not solely judged for what it is, might seem unfair, but it is surely something that Jeffrey Eugenides could have foreseen. Having chosen semiotics as one of his themes, he must have realized that books refer to other books, and that human experiences are similarly related: we experience life through the accounts of the experiences of others. What we read, hear and see in advance, influences how we perceive reality and how we judge our own experiences. Everything makes us think of something else, reminds us of what has been noted before. In short: we live in a pre-experienced world.

Eugenides is playing with this concept throughout his novel. His chosen motto is from La Rochefoucauld: ‘People would never fall in love if they hadn’t heard love talked about.’ He often describes objects with popular references (‘black iron fences like those in a Charles Addams cartoon or a Lovecraft story’). He even lets one of his characters state that his goal in life is ‘to become an adjective’, to create a unique universe to which others can refer by using your name. Like Kafkaesque or Tolstoyan. To say that The Marriage Plot was not Eugenidesean enough, could therefore also be interpreted as a compliment.

But what was so disappointing? I loved the utterly American setting (a college on the Northeastern coast in the early nineteen eighties), I marveled at the style (‘What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative!’) and I was interested in reading about manic depression and Christian mysticism. The novel is also very engaging; Eugenides does not miss one detail to bring you back into a time and place. He quotes the movies his characters watch, describes the food they crave, mention the tracks they play in the bar and the photos they have framed on their walls. On top of that, the novel provided me with the joy of recognition: Derrida, Barthes and their delicious incomprehensibility. It could have been all so entertaining.

The letdown set in fairly early though when I realized that Madeleine, the female protagonist, was not developing into a character for whom I could cheer. The long opening section is written from her point of view and she does not come across as particularly interesting. I hoped this would change once she got over the hangover she presumably had, but that wasn’t the case. Nearly half of the novel is given to her, but as well read and clever as the people around her seem to be, Madeleine herself does not spark. Things just seem to happen to her and she responds haphazardly. Her thoughts are often limited to reflections about her sex life, her looks, her moderate career ambitions and the lack of party-time. Why the two male characters fall in love with her and become obsessed remains a mystery. Perhaps they are not so profound after all, falling for a pretty girl, whose looks are nonetheless never described to be amazing.

By the end, when the male characters take the stage more often, the novel becomes much better, but ultimately The Marriage Plot does not deliver what it promises. From the opening lines of the book, the title and the interest Madeleine has in the role of matrimony in fictional plots, I had expected a story in which the reading of Victorian novels would somehow influence the outcome. I had expected a love story of our times, something to replace the epic and romantic stories of our past. Not necessary with a happy ending, but with something that would show us how we perceive love differently now, because we have read the stories of our past. Perhaps Eugenides realized too late that this replacing love story does not exist. The Marriage Plot is therefore mainly a novel about literature (and its limitations), a metafiction for semiotics to explore, and says too little about life. Or in the thoughts of Madeleine: “If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognized that being ‘in love’ was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny. Madeleine knew all that. The problem was, it didn’t work.”

More opinions? The NYT is moderately positive, the Guardian is not convinced (‘it certainly doesn’t play to the idiosyncratic strengths of its gifted author’), and the Washington Post calls it ‘exceptionally witty and poignant.’